The costs of 'free' knowledge
The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI companies scrapped Wikipedia content on an industrial scale. In April 2025, the foundation reported that bandwidth used to download multimedia content has grown by 50 percent since January 2024, with bots responsible for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to core infrastructure, despite accounting for only 35 percent of total page views.
In October, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that human traffic to Wikipedia had fallen by about 8 percent year-over-year after the organization updated its bot detection systems and discovered that many of what appeared to be human visitors were actually automated scrapers built to evade detection.
The decline in visitor numbers threatens the feedback loop that Wikipedia has maintained for a quarter of a century: readers visit, some become editors or donors, and the content apparently improves. But today, many AI chatbots and search engine summaries answer questions using Wikipedia content without sending users to the site itself.
Meanwhile, the foundation's own experiments with generative AI have met resistance from the volunteer editors who maintain the site. In June, Wikipedia halted a pilot program for AI-generated article summaries after editors called it a “horrible idea” and warned it could undermine trust in the platform.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told The Associated Press that he welcomes the training of AI models based on Wikipedia data. “Personally, I'm really happy that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it's curated by humans,” Wales said. “I wouldn't really want to use an AI that's only trained on X, you know, like a really angry AI.” But he drew the line at free access: “You should probably contribute and pay for your fair share of the costs you impose on us.”
